by Nicole Baart
“Bovine? Did you just call farmers stupid?”
“I did. But I was wrong. I like your dad. He’s a Renaissance man—and I’m not just using the term casually.” She wrinkled her nose. “People don’t even know what that means anymore.”
“I never pegged you as such a romantic.”
Harper laughed. “You know I’m not. But this is deliciously shocking. Your little life isn’t at all what I expected it to be, Adri-Girl. You live a fine balance, my friend. You walk the very edge of two worlds.”
Adri snorted, but didn’t respond.
They wove between the barns without another word, though Adri could practically hear the enthusiastic patter of Harper’s thoughts. A cat! An old wagon! A tangle of spent wild rose! Life and love and the aching beauty of our very existence contained in the droop of a wilted flower! It was mildly patronizing, and Adri wished that there was something that would lend validity, weight to her upbringing. She already battled Harper’s blithe assumption that she was innocent, sheltered, untried. Apparently a weekend visit to the family farm wasn’t helping matters at all.
At the end of the alley between buildings, Adri climbed over the wide, metal gate at the entrance to the pasture, and leaped deftly over the nearly invisible wire of the electric fence that cackled just on the far side. She stood, arms crossed, and waited for her best friend to navigate the unfamiliar obstacle. It wasn’t often that she had the upper hand in their relationship, and it was hard not to take a certain satisfied pleasure in watching Harper flounder out of her element.
But Harper hesitated only for a moment. Then in one fluid motion she raced up the rungs of the fence as if it were a ladder, paused with one hand and both feet on the very top, and launched herself, a free-form dancer sailing over the side and into the tall grass. She nicked the electric fence on her way down.
There was a spark, a sound a little like a whip being cracked, and Harper jerked as if she were being electrocuted.
“Hot damn!” Her legs went out from under her and she landed on her ass in the grass.
Adri couldn’t help but laugh.
“Your fence almost killed me!” Harper pouted, rubbing the back of her calf where the fence had slapped her skin.
“It’s three thousand volts. On a pulse. My fence did not almost kill you.”
“Whatever. I’m suing.”
Adri offered Harper her hands and hoisted her to a standing position. “Knock yourself out. You won’t get much. You’ve seen the extent of our fortune and I’m going to let you in on a little secret: we’re mortgaged to the hilt.”
Harper put her hands on her hips and did a slow survey of the land. The pasture was by far the prettiest corner of the farm. It was sparsely wooded and sloped toward the river, flooded by a waving sea of prairie grasses that bowed to the breeze and sent pollen-like diamond dust to float in the warm autumn air. There was a certain magic here, in the dappled shade of the gnarled trees, their arthritic branches angling low to mingle with the creamy tufts that still clung to slender stalks of switchgrass.
Adri could see that Harper was enchanted by all of it, and she grabbed her friend by the elbow before she could fall too deeply in love. “Watch out for the cow pie.”
“Shit!”
“No pun intended,” Adri laughed.
“Oh, pun absolutely intended.”
They made their way past the few grazing cows—Jerseys, all caramel brown with eyes as wide and damp as a fawn’s—and climbed carefully over a second fence, this one barbed wire, at the very edge of the Vogt property. The river was on the other side, and beyond that, the bluffs above Blackhawk. Because the river was serpentine, they couldn’t see the long, white bridge that led into town, even though it was less than a mile away as the crow flies. But they could see the peak of the Galloway mansion poking through the treetops in the hills above the river. And as soon as Adri caught sight of the square turret of the tower, she knew that the mansion was exactly why she had led Harper through the pasture in the first place. If Harper wanted a fairy tale, she’d find it in the arched Palladian windows of the Galloways’ Italian-style villa.
The corniced roofline stamped an orderly edge against a strip of blue sky, and even from such a distance, they could just make out the ornate corbels that propped up the projecting eaves. Adri had visited the mansion once a year for as long as she could remember, and her memory filled out the silhouette of the sweeping veranda, the high windows, the artful stonework that transported her to another era, another world.
“What is that place?” Harper asked, wonder in her voice.
“Piperhall.” Adri grinned. “That is your fantasy. Your happily-ever-after ending.”
“Is there a prince?” Harper’s lip curled up hawkishly. “Because I think we should seduce him and split the spoils.”
“Be my guest.” Adri stripped a stalk of volunteer oats and began to husk the grain in her palm. “He goes to ATU.”
“Shut up. There really is a prince? And he graces our humble little halls of higher learning?”
“How do you think a small town like Blackhawk supports a college like ATU? The Galloways practically own the university. David’s daddy probably bought him a diploma and the A’s to go with it.”
“David Galloway?” Harper’s mind was spinning. Adri could practically see the whirl of her daydreams. “Tall and blond? Kind of hunky? I think he’s in my Western Civ class.”
“I don’t know that I’d call him hunky,” Adri snorted. “But he’s not blond. More like pale brunet.”
Harper threw back her head and laughed. “Pale brunet? What does that even mean? Spill. What do you know about this guy?”
It wasn’t like Harper to care, but Adri could tell that she was genuinely interested. Maybe even more than interested. Harper had closed the space between them and was mere inches from Adri’s face, searching as if she could find answers hidden in every nuance of expression. “I don’t know.” Adri shrugged, taking a step back. As much as she adored Harper, she didn’t much care for her habit of close talking. “It’s mostly gossip and hearsay.”
“Ooh! I love gossip.”
Adri couldn’t help but smile. Harper was an amazing gossip—to the point that Adri suspected her friend of making up rumors when there were none to spread around.
“Fine,” Adri sighed, giving in. But even as she feigned reluctance, she was eager to invite Harper into the mystery of her youth. The riddle that was the Galloway family. But she didn’t know where to start. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
After a moment Adri said, “The Galloways are old money. Liam—that’s David’s dad—was the descendant of a lumber baron who made his fortune in Michigan and decided to settle as far away from his family as he could, or so the story goes.”
“Was?”
“He died a few months ago.” Adri raised a shoulder almost imperceptibly. “I saw him once a year, at the Piperhall summer picnic, but we never spoke. He was tall, gray-haired . . . kind of scary.”
“You find all men scary,” Harper teased.
Adri didn’t justify the comment with a response. “The Galloways are new money, too. Biodiesel.”
“I don’t think that’s a thing.” Harper raised an eyebrow. “Old money and new money? It’s all just money, Adri. Besides, I don’t really care about where they got it. I want the juicy stuff: who they sleep with, what skeletons they have buried in the woods, why in the world their estate is called Piperhall.”
“It’s the stuff legends are made of,” Adri said with a sly look. She started walking, and didn’t bother to look back and see if Harper was following. “When the house was built over a hundred years ago, Lord Galloway—”
“He was a lord?” Harper interrupted from somewhere behind.
“Who knows? The stuff of legends, remember? Anyway, he had a little daughter—�
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“Named Piper,” Harper cut in again.
Adri nodded. “Apparently he and his wife were so wrapped up in the construction of the mansion, they didn’t pay any attention to the girl. She wandered off one day and was never found. Lord Galloway had wanted to call the estate Galloway Hall, but when Piper was lost, people kept calling it ‘Piper’s Hall.’ I suppose the name just evolved.”
“What happened to her?” Harper asked almost reverently.
“I’m guessing she fell into an old well. It happens. Or maybe she made it to the river and drowned.”
Harper was silent for a moment. “Sounds fictitious to me,” she eventually said.
“Isn’t that the point? I told you, it’s a legend.”
“Piperhall,” Harper mused. “I like it. It’s musical somehow.”
Adri held her tongue.
There was a trail through the underbrush, a mostly overgrown footpath that had suffered neglect in the month that Adri had been away at college. Weaving through the trees, she felt a worming sense of disquiet at the realization that her feet had kept the dirt path clear in the years before she left. What did that say about her? About her interest in the Galloways? In Piperhall? Because now that she was leading Harper to the bridge, to the secret place where she gazed at the tower of their impenetrable mansion, she understood that her interest in the Galloways bordered on addiction. Adri stifled the unsettling thought.
They were a good mile or more from the farmhouse when Adri caught sight of her destination and stopped. The old train bridge was barely visible, poking through the trees as if stealing a peek at the two girls as they stood side by side, polar opposites in almost every way. It was really only half a bridge, because the other half had crumbled into the river long ago. There was a thin tendril of stone that connected one side to the other, but it was uncrossable. At least, Adri considered it so. An almost paralyzing fear of heights prevented her from ever finding out if the narrow walkway would support her weight. But she had managed to scale the footings at the base of the bridge on her side of the river, and had claimed a spot near the top as her own. Sitting with her back against the ancient rampart was an adrenaline rush parallel to none. And it was the perfect spot to sit and daydream about the mansion at the top of the hill—and the family inside it.
“Damn,” Harper said, the word leaking out in one long, slow exhalation. “You are completely obsessed, aren’t you?”
Adri pushed a hard breath through her lips. “Whatever. It’s a great spot.”
“A great spot for spying. I see what you’re doing here. You can’t pull one over on me. Great mansion, family fortune, handsome prince . . . You’re angling for a shot at a dream.”
“That’s absurd. You’re being completely ridiculous.”
But, of course, Harper wasn’t being ridiculous at all. She was slicing through it all to the very heart of the matter. Because a dream was exactly what Adri wanted. It was all that she’d wanted all her life.
Adri shouldn’t have been surprised when, just over a week later, Harper poked her head around Adri’s open dorm room door and gave her an elated, silent scream. She had her hand linked around none other than David Galloway’s arm.
And just like that there were five of them.
Harper was sketchy on the details of how she befriended David, or more accurately, how she hijacked him long enough to make him fall just a little bit in love with her like all the rest of them were. But it didn’t really matter.
That first day, sitting backward on Adri’s desk chair, David was as cool as a crisp autumn day, reserved and dignified as a prince. Adri could hardly form a single coherent thought. Here he was. Her dream, her David. The small-town luminary, a prep-school demigod from a family so rich they owned a private jet just so that they could fly away from Blackhawk if they wanted to see a Broadway show or enjoy St. Lucia in the spring. It turned out the only reason he had stuck around northwest Iowa for college was because Liam had just passed away, and though he had acceptance letters from Dartmouth and Duke, and probably a handful of other schools, familial duty required he stay close to his mother and transfer out of the Midwest in his sophomore year. Of course, it didn’t hurt that ATU was endowed by the Galloway family. Their name was featured on plaques that graced nearly every building of the stately, redbrick campus.
But David wasn’t aloof for long. He was well-bred, almost frighteningly self-controlled, but it wasn’t who he wanted to be. He’d launch himself onto Adri’s bed after classes, tucking his suntanned arms behind his head, and ask, “How are we going to get into trouble today, girls?” Harper always had an idea.
Not too shockingly, David never transferred. Adri liked to believe that was because of her. And Harper and William and Jackson. But she hoped it was mostly her.
Whenever Adri thought of David in the years after, she could never quite remember the cant of his eyes or the exact shade of his brown hair. Was it chestnut? Or umber? Were there dark blond streaks in the summer? Or did her imagination paint them in? Every once in a while Adri could pretend that she caught a whiff of his scent. Horses and leather, and maybe just a hint of Scotch if he’d been drinking a little, or an undertone of Clive Christian X if he’d been drinking a lot and wanted to cover it up. David had admitted to her once that his mother had spent more than 300 dollars on the bottle of cologne when they were in London one winter, simply because she wanted him to be singular—she wanted to be able to pick him out in a crowd, even if she was utterly blind. Which was stupid. Anyone could pick out David in a crowd. Deaf or blind.
But try as she might to conjure up the David she had known, the one she fell in love with all those years ago, the man with the quick smile and beautiful hands and the voice of a jazz singer, the picture that was burned in Adri’s mind was a still life of David and Harper. Always Harper. Forever Harper.
Harper with her arms around David, his face turned toward the sky. His eyes open, surprised and wide. Her head bent over his like a lover. They were gorgeous together, cut from stone, a Renaissance masterpiece but for Harper’s hair. It fell around them both, swirled up by the water. It was tangled and sticky, a dirty mass of clinging spiderwebs curling against her cheeks.
It was black with the stain of his blood.
“We could stop, you know.”
Adri didn’t mean to gasp, but as she jerked her attention to her dad, she knew that her shock had unnerved him.
“Sorry,” Sam said. He ducked a little, tucking his chin into the curve of his collar before straightening and indicating a road off to the right. It was almost completely hidden by trees, but Adri found herself angling for a better view all the same. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Sam apologized. “I know this must be a lot to take in, but I thought you might like to go see how things are at Piperhall.”
No, Adri thought. Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.
But that’s not what she said.
She said yes.
5
The road to piperhall was a narrow, tree-lined drive that felt distinctly antebellum to adri. Branches of gnarled burr oaks tangled overhead, dappling the sun and creating an emerald cathedral that inspired an unexpected reverence. Passing beneath the hushed nave in a vehicle had always seemed wrong to her, and it wasn’t until david had taken her riding that she realized her discomfort was because the estate belonged to a different era. An era of horses and carriages and skirts so wide they required sidesaddles and delicately crossed legs. Of course, adri didn’t ride sidesaddle—no one who frequented the estate did—but that didn’t stop adri from pretending that she had been transported to another time when she visited the sprawling grounds. Something she did with ever-increasing frequency when she fell madly, astonishingly, head over heels in love with david.
Not that she could remember a time when she hadn’t been in love with him. Though their land was separated by the river and a couple of miles—the bl
uffs too sheer to navigate, even if she had dared to try—Adri had felt the pull of Piperhall, of David, even as a child.
“Victoria let her gardeners go,” Sam said, almost apologetically. “A couple of years ago. She hired a local landscaping company to come in once a week, but they can’t keep up.”
Of course they couldn’t keep up. Fourteen acres couldn’t be tended in a day, even if the Galloways hadn’t bothered to commission formal gardens. If rumor could be trusted, the formidable Liam Galloway had insisted that the extensive lawns be kept neat and trim, but Victoria had petitioned for a more organic approach to groundskeeping. She adored the natural prairie grasses. Liam wanted a manicured yard. It was no secret who had won that particular battle, as the pristine lawn around a small forest of trees was fairway short in spite of the unforgiving climate of northwest Iowa.
Or, it had been. Now the lawn was patchy and thin, bared down to the dirt in places and sprouting seed in others. The thin blades of grass that did exist were bushy and limp, hanging to the ground as if in surrender.
Even the gravel drive seemed unkempt, deeply grooved from tire tracks that hadn’t been graded in a very long time.
As they neared the house, it struck Adri that Harper had been right all those years ago. Piperhall was a fairy tale tipped crooked, spun off its axis at a disconcerting angle that made Adri feel as if she’d had just a sip too much wine. And yet, as jarringly different as it was from the life she had left behind in Africa, the gorgeous, iconic Galloway estate was also her home.
“It’s different,” she managed. What she meant was: It’s the same. It’s exactly the same.
The stables were the first thing that could be glimpsed through the trees, and Adri found herself craning, sitting forward in her seat for the tiniest glimpse of the long, low redbrick building that had become little more than fodder for late-night regrets. And yet, when she saw it, she fought the urge to close her eyes. The stable was a flint that sparked the tinderbox of emotions Adri had successfully buried for years.
